OpenTechSchool2017-08-07T11:27:42+00:00http://blog.opentechschool.orgAleksaleks@opentechschool.orgWhat OpenTechSchool brought to Dortmund2014-02-17T00:00:00+00:00http://blog.opentechschool.org/2014/02/what-opentechschool-brought-to-dortmund<h2 id="what-opentechschool-brought-to-dortmund">What OpenTechSchool brought to Dortmund</h2>
<p>When I heard about OpenTechSchool the first time , I was very curious. What would this be all about?</p>
<h3 id="nerdy-dortmund-back-in-the-days">Nerdy Dortmund back in the Days</h3>
<p>You’ve to know, that I live in Dortmund ever since I can remember. Dortmund is a relatively large city, in middle of the German Ruhr-Area. Back then we were very famous for our football team, beer and the steel industry. Not exactly the best place to grow up in when you are out for computer science. To be honest you rarely had the chance to bounce into a fellow computer nerd at this time. Not even at “hotspots” where public internet access was available.</p>
<p><img src="/assets/content/2014-02-17-ots-brought-to-dortmund/landmark-dortmund.jpg" alt="The golden U. Landmark of Dortmund" /></p>
<p>So the only chance, to interact with people sharing a similar interest, was to participate in online forums. We regularly founded coder groups, communities and projects. We unsuccessfully tried to translate RFC Documents into local language and successfully wrote horrible tutorials and much more horrible pieces of software. We did build friendships, lurked on IRC and helped each other out a lot. In short: we had a <strong><em>really</em></strong> great time!</p>
<p>Over the years I initialized and joined lots of groups and projects. But I always missed some really important aspects. Especially the personal “face-to-face” contact. Mentoring would have been great at some points, too. So I started attending local user groups but this wasn’t very satisfying because most of the time they just had some beers and chatter in a local pub. Not exactly what I was looking for at this time. After that, I discovered hackspaces. That was way better but still very low frequented by passionate software developers. But because this was the closest thing, as would get to my imagination of an active and tech oriented community as a would get, I decided to stay here for a while.</p>
<p>At some point I nearly lost faith in founding a nice local development oriented community. Dortmund for sure, had a lot awesome developers to offer. But why haven’t they found each other yet? We have amazing computer science universities over here. As well as a very promising design college. But it just seemed nearly impossible to motivate the people to come over and join a regular event. Everybody was still at home, on their own, doing stuff. And every attempt to have some joined events, with some of the usergroups or neighbouring hackspaces in nearby towns was doomed to fail. Very pity!</p>
<h3 id="starting-opentechschool-in-dortmund">Starting OpenTechSchool in Dortmund</h3>
<p>This is why I was very curious, when I heard about OpenTechSchool for the first time. I already knew how hard and unthankful it can be, to try to start such a regular event in Dortmund. Me myself tried to build some local and real-life communities, related to computer programming, and failed due to a the lack of local participation. Our events usually started out well, but slowly ended somewhere with about 5 to 7 regular visiting people.</p>
<p><img src="/assets/content/2014-02-17-ots-brought-to-dortmund/ots-kickoff.jpg" alt="Picture of the very first OTS Dortmund Meeting" /></p>
<p>When I entered the Kick-Off event, I barely knew what OpenTechSchool was about. I never heared about the movement itself, about where it started or about how many chapters already existed. All I knew was, that I was curious and interested in the group, who wanted to start something similar to what I was trying to build up the the last 5 years. So when I entered the Kick-Off there I was quite amazed to see that many people in the room, interested to build and participate into such an event. You have to keep in mind, that this isn’t any major city meetup like Berlin or Hamburg. This was so great!</p>
<p>Most of all there haven’t been just people from Dortmund itself. We had visitors from surrounding cities. Between a reach of 30 to 100 kilometers. Even from the bordering Netherlands, we had Niels who held a Node.js Workshop for us, some months later.</p>
<p>This was definitely the point when I decided that I want to participate into building the OpenTechSchool chapter up with this people. As I said, I searched for something like this, for years.</p>
<p>Since then a lot good things took place, initiated and lead by OpenTechSchool Dortmund.
Since October 2013, we organized 3 workshops. One workshop in collaboration with the local university. In four days, we taught thirteen girls, between the age of 12 and 15, to build Android applications. Therefore we translated some original MIT AppInventor tutorials into German language and coached the girls, so that after two days, they were able to start developing their own applications. I’ve seldom seen such an impressed audience, like the time when the girls presented their results to parents and university staff.</p>
<p><img src="/assets/content/2014-02-17-ots-brought-to-dortmund/app-inventor-workshop.jpg" alt="Female Android teenage workshop participators" /></p>
<p>This was just a few weeks after the jsFAB Workshop, the very first workshop. <a href="/2013/10/jsfab-dortmund-october.html">We wrote about that here, earlier.</a>. A month ago, in January 2014, we had a very special coach, leading a workshop on Node.js. Niels Doorn from Enschede/Netherlands was so amazed of our chapter’s work and the OpenTechSchool philosophy in general that he decided to come over to Germany for a weekend and teach a day of Node.js.</p>
<p><img src="/assets/content/2014-02-17-ots-brought-to-dortmund/nodejs-workshop.jpg" alt="Picture of the node.js workshop participators" /></p>
<p>And this is where the really impressive part starts out. At the point when we started planning the workshop some really interesting things started to bubble up. You remember when I wrote about the local community I experienced years ago? Everyone doing very isolated and groups not mixing up? This was the first workshop we could have been taken place at a befriended hackerspace. This was the first workshop we had helping hands from befriended people, who founded and led the major PHP user-group years ago. This, for me, was the first workshop I felt proud about the things we did build for our local technology community.</p>
<p>We can tell by our regular learner’s meetups, that we build up a local community of regular attendees. Since october we organized about four meetups for mature learner’s and one for the juniors. Especially for the regular learner’s meetup we were lucky enough to acquire very interesting talks and presentations. From Angular over Docker to MongoDB. And at every learner’s meetup we have a lot of fun afterwards at a local pub, chatting about tech or just making new friends. People present their pet projects and share interesting insights of several technologies, they were using during their projects.</p>
<p><img src="/assets/content/2014-02-17-ots-brought-to-dortmund/meetup-afterhour.jpg" alt="People playing table soccer after learner's meetup" /></p>
<h3 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h3>
<p>I am not quite sure if this would have been possible in Dortmund, without a well known and well organized community like OpenTechSchool is. Many people I talked to, have heard about the OpenTechSchool in the first case and then just searched for a chapter near to their location. In their cases the Dortmund chapter. This is why we also have such a wide reach. Bochum, Essen, Cologne, Kleve, Duesseldorf, Bielefeld and even Enschede! The people of Dortmund’s neighbouring cities usually don’t search for events outside their cities. Even when the borders of the Ruhr-Area cities are very very close to each other, traveling to another city’s event sadly seems to be a seldom practice. This time, thanks to OTS it is a lot different. The people come over because they are curious to learn and to interact with others of their kind. They make awesome experiences and befriend each other. Build something up. So that in the end, they recognize, that it is worth the just 15 minute travel.</p>
<p>I am very happy to have an OpenTechSchool over here and I am curious again. But this time I am more curious about the upcoming year. Because I know that we did build some really great community, with very inspiring and kind people who strongly believe in the principles and philosophy of open source and sharing knowledge. I know now, that it is possible to go further. Doing more workshops and teach more people how to code or how to improve their personal skill levels. All just while having a good time with other people, who share the same interest than me.</p>
<p>We as organizers, surely still have a lot to learn and work on ourselves. But I like that and I am sure, we will work some good ways out.</p>
<p>Today, I helped coaching twelve year olds HTML/CSS again and we all had lots of fun. I am glad that I decided to support OpenTechSchool in Dortmund. Especially for all the people I met since than. Next Wednesday we will host our fifth monthly Learner’s Meetup and feel very proud about that. Perhabs we will meet there, too?</p>
<p>Well then. See you soon! :)</p>
JavaScript for absolute beginners, October 12-13th2013-10-28T00:00:00+00:00http://blog.opentechschool.org/2013/10/jsfab-dortmund-october
<p>Dortmund is one of the new outposts of the OpenTechSchool. On the 12th and 13th of October we have premiered with our first workshop!</p>
<p>We started with JavaScript for absolute beginners (#jsfab) to teach people Javascript, and 21 learners quickly volunteered themselves to join us. For this workshop we had nine coaches (Dennis, Georg, Hendrik, Lars, Leif, Mark, Mathias, Ola and me) to support the learners during their exercises. The location had been graciously offered by the <a href="http://www.staendigevertretungdortmund.de/">Ständige Vertretung</a>, a co-working space, free of charge.</p>
<p><img src="/assets/content/2013-10-28-jsfabdortmund/learners.jpg" alt="21 inquisitive learners" /></p>
<p>The learners came from many different backgrounds - some had already been programming in other languages, while others were totally new to programming.
With a range of roughly 20 to 45 years, there was also a wide spread regarding age.
It was great to see that we had a practically even ratio females to males.</p>
<p>Over two days they were introduced to the basics of programming, like variables, types, operators, functions, control structures and loops.
With those tools and provided with simplified APIs they did some graphical rendering of animated html elements.
The first smilies appeared very fast, not only on screens but also on people’s faces.</p>
<p><img src="/assets/content/2013-10-28-jsfabdortmund/smilie_laptop.png" alt="Smilies on screen" /></p>
<p><img src="/assets/content/2013-10-28-jsfabdortmund/smilies.jpg" alt="Smilies" /></p>
<p>On the first day before lunch, <a href="http://twitter.com/janl">Jan Lehnardt</a> showed up to engage everyone towards getting into programming and into the OpenTechSchool community.</p>
<p>During the rest of the day the first self-rendered graphs appeared.
Attendees came up with quite creative approaches to many of the problems that they faced.
For example, some were rendering helper lines to each point of a graph to visually debug their code.</p>
<p>On the Saturday evening most participants met together again at a local pub for some socializing, so that Sunday started a little bit slower and with some tired faces.
Fortunately that didn’t stop them from forging ahead the second day.
At the end of the day people became exhausted from the effort put into the course, so we started a small feedback session.
The consensus of the learners was that everyone was happy with their achievements and would be willing to come back next time, and all coaches had a lot of fun and were proud of the attendees.
The course material had been very entertaining and engaging for all.</p>
<p>In a preliminary discussion we feared that with so many people in a small room, the noise would become too high for a good learning environment.
Luckily, we were pleasantly surprised that this wasn’t the case, and everyone was focused on the gorgeous course material.</p>
<p>Looking at these positive experiences we will definitely keep on moving forward with the OpenTechSchool in Dortmund!</p>
Expanding east and west2013-08-12T00:00:00+00:00http://blog.opentechschool.org/2013/08/expanding-east-and-west
<p>We are very happy to welcome three more local teams to the global OpenTechSchool Community: <a href="http://www.meetup.com/opentechschool-tel-aviv/">Tel-Aviv</a> and <a href="http://www.opentechschool.org/ramallah/">Ramallah</a> - both in the middle east and <a href="http://www.opentechschool.org/dortmund/">Dortmund</a> in lovely Ruhrgebiet, so far the farthest west (in Germany).</p>
<h3 id="tel-aviv">Tel-Aviv</h3>
<p><img src="/assets/content/2013-08-12-east-west/coaching-in-tel-aviv.jpg" alt="Workshop at Hamifal in Tel-Aviv" /></p>
<p>People in Tel-Aviv, the startup and tech capital of Israel didn’t need much convincing. Quite the opposite, nothing less than twelve people came to <a href="http://www.meetup.com/opentechschool-tel-aviv/events/125913422/">the kick-off meeting</a> after the <a href="http://www.meetup.com/opentechschool-tel-aviv/events/123856622/">first Python Workshop</a> to become part of a local team. And within the first month they already grew by another three members and hosted the same workshop another two times. That local team is busy, too busy to get a team page ready before this blog post even. But who needs that if <a href="http://www.meetup.com/opentechschool-tel-aviv/">the meetups</a> are fully booked every time and they are already supported by local coworking space <a href="http://hamifal.com/">Hamifal</a> and Google allowing them to use <a href="http://www.campustelaviv.com/">their Campus</a> for the workshops. Keep on rocking.</p>
<h3 id="ramallah">Ramallah</h3>
<p><img src="/assets/content/2013-08-12-east-west/coaching-in-ramallah.jpg" alt="Coaching in Ramallah" /></p>
<p>Also in <a href="http://www.opentechschool.org/ramallah/">Ramallah</a>, the lesser known startup and tech centre at the other side of the wall the seed fell on fertile ground. The first OpenTechSchool workshop on arabic soil, the <a href="http://www.meetup.com/opentechschool-ramallah/events/126366562/">Python Workshop at Exalt</a>, though set up on a very short notice of just two days in advance, was a huge success. And inspired locals to continue the work, coming back with more workshops after a short Ramadan break now. Join <a href="http://www.meetup.com/opentechschool-ramallah/">the meetup-page to stay up</a> to date and write <a href="mailto:hosam[at]opentechschool[dot]org">Hosam</a>, if you want to help organising more events in Palestine.</p>
<h3 id="dortmund">Dortmund</h3>
<p><img src="/assets/content/2013-08-12-east-west/team-dortmund.png" alt="Team Dortmund" /></p>
<p>Similar goes for the next chapter in Germany: <a href="http://www.opentechschool.org/dortmund/">Dortmund</a>, the first local team in lovely Ruhrgebiet will be joining the OpenTechSchool with their <a href="http://www.meetup.com/opentechschool-dortmund/events/124311122/">official Kick-Off event on September 3rd</a>. If you are around and interested in helping out, <a href="http://www.meetup.com/opentechschool-dortmund/events/124311122/">please come join</a>. And though the local chapter hasn’t officially launched just yet, the team is already actively discussing on creating more and extended materials. For example about creating material for an HTML5 &amp; CSS workshop following the workshop the <a href="https://twitter.com/OTS_BLN/status/363307157799698436">Berlin team co-hosted</a> with the RailsGirls as a satellite event of TechOpenAir-Berlin two weeks ago.</p>
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<p>{.smalltext}Interested in joining the global OpenTechSchool community with a local organisational team yourself? Get right to it by following this <a href="http://www.opentechschool.org/handbooks/city-blueprint.html">city-blueprint setup guide</a>. And if you need any more help, just let us know.</p>
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